The Pistons vs. The Spurs

The 23-34 #Pistons are in San Antonio to take on the 40-16 Spurs on Wednesday night. The Pistons won their last game against the Spurs at the Palace beating the a stunned San Antonio team 101-109 in John Loyer’s debut, but has lost their last three on the road.

The good: It’s great going into a game against a clearly better team knowing that you can beat them.The bad: The Pistons have dropped five of their last six and are just 4-17 against Western Conference opponents. They’ve also lost nine of its last 11 road games.
Watch out for Belinelli who had the hot hand the last time these two teams met.The unknown: Will my prediction come right that I made over at Project Spurs when they asked me some questions about Detroit and tonight’s game?
Will we see an Austin Day sighting, who was traded to the Spurs from Toronto at the deadline.

We don’t tank because the decision makers have established a stubborn, foolish culture where they believe the #1 virtue in life is winning as many games as humanly possible in the current season. They refuse to operate in the real world, where this team exists in a continuum and the decisions of one season bleed into the next.

It’s a combination of stubbornness, stupidity, pride, and the compounding problems that accompany long stretches of losing. And this poisonous attitude has infected the owner as well. We haven’t been to the playoffs in five years, so they believe that returning to the playoffs is the cure and that they must pursue this goal at all costs, failing to realize that reaching the playoffs isn’t a cure in itself. The cure is found in fixing the problems at the source, which are at the roster, coaching, scouting, player development levels. They need to fix the culture and build a winner from the bottom up, but they’re too busy trying to squeeze every last win out of a roster that has a perpetually low ceiling.

In this league, in almost any case, you have to bottom out to build back up. This team tried “reloading” with guys like Ben Gordon and Charlie V, and they’re stuck in a cycle they’ve consistently refused to break free of. They have had many opportunities to take small steps backwards in hopeless seasons in order to position themselves for future success, never more so than this season, but they refuse. They would rather win 30 games for eternity than suffer one season of 20 even if it meant they would break the cycle and position themselves for a brighter future.

Take Rodney Stuckey for example. I am confident that some playoff team somewhere would have given us something of value to rent him for a late season run. But instead, the Pistons made a deliberate choice to keep him for the last meaningless games of their sixth consecutive wasted season, knowing full well that he will sign elsewhere in free agency and be lost for absolutely nothing. The back-to-back Bobcats losses before the deadline were as clear a message as you could have asked for that the season was over (and if you’re 10ish games under .500 you can’t really hold your head high about sneaking into the playoffs) but the Pistons refused to accept their fate once again and capitalize on their situation. So they’ll come back and do this all over again next season, and the season after that, and the season after that.

Oh, and my best guess (which is usually a REALLY good guess) is that Tom Gores is drunk on the Greg Monroe-Andre Drummond Kool-Aid and will insist on matching any offer sheet for Greg. There is no other excuse for holding onto him at the deadline. You’re not going to get more for him in a sign-and-trade than you would have last week, when there would be more teams bidding and they could use him for a stretch run. I think he’s here to stay and the team is sunk.

improbable. Gores doesn’t even know the names of every player on the team. He didn’t even know who Josh Smith was until after he signed with the pistons.

Gores knows as much about basketball as he does nascar. Which is to say, nothing.

I’m sure Gores doesn’t care one way or another who is on this piston’s team. He is not like you or me. We care. We either hate or love Greg same with Josh, Brandon and of course without exception we all love Drummond.

Gores is one of these businessmen owners. He is not Kuban or even Prokhorov. Here are some words Kuban had to say about Prokhorov not showing up to the games:

“It’s like trying to run a company and not being able to go to the sales meetings. Not being able to go to the customer service or support meetings.”

Tom Gores has been to one pre-season game and one regular season home game. He might show up at the staples center if the piston’s are in town, but only because it’s so close to where he lives, not because he likes basketball.

Tom Gores does NOT CARE. This is just a business to him. He’s not drunk on anything.

Oh, I’m with you on him not knowing d#ck about basketball. I guess one of two things is possible, and they’re both horrifying: A) Like I said, somewhere along the line he was convinced that as long as we have two of the more promising young big men in the league (regardless of how poorly they fit) we have a glorious foundation upon which to build. You don’t need to know anything about basketball to fall for something like this, and in fact knowing nothing about baketball is actually conducive to falling for this rhetoric. Or B) He just threw his hands up in the air because the team has been so crushingly bad, and decided the next guy can make all the decisions to turn this team around (of course not realizing that he’s left the next GM with no flexibility at all). Both are nightmares for this team, and I don’t think either one is any more or less plausible than the other.

I know you and others (Natalie included) think he doesn’t care. And I tend to agree for the most part. He certainly doesn’t care enough to actually learn the game or the business. No argument there. I just happen to think it’s just as likely that his problem has more to do with ignorance than anything. For instance, there’s evidence of a mandate that Josh be the player moved at the deadline or nothing, or else you’d think the team would be open to trading Monroe if it meant reaching the goal of the playoffs. Standing pat represented a conscious choice to miss the playoffs. If Joe thought it could save his job, it stands to reason that he’d be open to anything. After all, the argument for trading Monroe was very strong. So if Josh was the only player available, it stands to reason that in Tom’s mind, Greg and Andre are the future, and the future is bleak.

Don’t take this as too much of an insult, but I think anyone who still wants to build a loser around Drummond and Monroe is stubborn and ignorant. You’ve seen enough of a sample size to convince anyone paying attention that these two are a bad fit. Furthermore, you simply don’t have enough avenues to build around them. You don’t have anywhere near enough assets or flexibility to build a winner around them. It’s a lost cause and a dead end. You just want to believe that good things happen to good people, and you’ve been brainwashed into thinking they’re some perfect match, but they aren’t. You’ll learn the hard way like everyone else. You are among the portion of the fanbase who deserves what’s coming, because things aren’t getting better. Trust me.

sample size is very small for this year. We have about 100 minutes of josh + drummond and greg + drummond. we have a bit more with greg + josh something like 150 or 200 minutes, so we might have a tentative feel for that lineup. But I think it’s wrong to say we have enough minutes to say anything about drummond + greg. Even worse we dont even know if josh + drummond is a fit! All we got is a ton of minutes of jumbo something like 1,000+ minutes of josh + greg + drummond.

I think the only sample size we have enough of to tell for sure is that josh + greg + drummond is a disaster. You can look up the exact minutes if you like. Last year we didn’t see much of greg + drummond.

It would be nice this year to see more of those two together, wouldn’t mind seeing josh + drummond either. I mean just to see what our future is. Last year I think we had about 150 minutes of Greg + Andre, so maybe there are some stats there you can look at. But for this year, in my humble opinion we don’t have enough minutes with the proper lineups for us to say what we should do.